Jefferies Winds Down Outsourced Fixed-Income Trading Desk | LeapRate
Jefferies Financial Group is shutting down its outsourced fixed-income trading desk, stepping back from a business line it had been actively expanding as recently as last year, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The retreat is said to come alongside the departure of Joram Siegel, who led Jefferies’ fixed-income outsourced trading unit. Siegel joined the firm in early 2024 after running a comparable operation at Marex, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The outsourced desk was built to provide fixed-income execution services to asset managers who lack the resources to run full in-house trading operations.
Bloomberg noted that just a year ago, Jefferies had been hiring traders to grow the unit, making its decision to unwind it now a notable reversal.
The move highlights the difficulty of extending the outsourced trading model beyond its traditional home in equities. On the equity side, adoption has been climbing steadily: a Crisil Coalition Greenwich survey found that at least 15% of buy-side equity traders now use third-party providers to supplement their desks, up from 10% two years earlier.
Crisil Coalition counts more than 30 firms competing in the outsourced trading space, ranging from diversified players such as BNY Mellon to specialists like Tourmaline Partners.
Fixed income, by contrast, has proven a tougher market to crack, given its more fragmented liquidity and dealer-driven structure compared with equities.
Jefferies’ decision to exit the business so soon after entering it underscores the challenges facing firms looking to diversify their outsourced trading offerings beyond stocks, even as demand for such services continues to grow more broadly across the buy-side.
